Increasingly unpopular and facing a fracturing coalition, Trump is using government power to punish his critics, take political revenge, and revel in his own cruelty.
An image of a proposed Trump passport as posted by the White House on X.
(The White House)
Even as President Donald Trump’s hold over the electorate wanes, his administration’s naked authoritarian tendencies intensify. If you can tell a man’s mettle by how he behaves under pressure, Trump—mired in a ludicrous standoff of his own making with Iran and cratering in the polls—is putting on a display of raw narcissism and petty cruelty unparalleled among modern democracies.
When Robert Mueller died in March, Trump went onto social media to post a note explaining that he was glad that Mueller was dead. This was after he had declared that the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife by their mentally ill son was a result of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Yet, when late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel made a mildly off-color joke about Melania Trump looking like an “expectant widow”—this was before the shooting and possible assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner—Trump responded first by demanding, again, that ABC fire Kimmel and then by siccing Brendan Carr’s pliant FCC onto the broadcaster, initiating an unprecedented review of many of the network’s local licenses.
The idea of the FCC head serving as a “hatchet man” is “really something,” Jessie Walker, books editor at Reason Magazine and author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America, told me. “They’re not being subtle about what they are doing at all.”
The FCC has argued that the scrutiny being accorded ABC licenses is solely to do with an investigation into its diversity policies (since, clearly, according to the white supremacist mores of the administration any efforts to present a diverse face to US viewers are somehow, inherently, illegitimate). Yet the timing of this makes it all too clear that in reality it is spiteful, vengeance politics, designed to pressure ABC into ditching Kimmel.
Current Issue
In all likelihood, the efforts to pull ABC affiliates from the air will go nowhere; after all, the broadcaster’s parent company, Disney, has pretty deep pockets, and its lawyers aren’t going to let the company go quietly into the night. But the mere fact that the Trump administration is attempting to pull this trick shows just how far from democratic norms it has strayed and just how much it is willing to lean into the playbook used to such great effect over the past two decades by authoritarian leaders such as Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and Tayyip Erdoğan. “If they get away with it, you have to ask what is the next step they would take?” Walker said.
And then there’s Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s Justice Department. Somehow, Blanche is proving himself to be even more of a hack, even more of a lackey, even more of a sycophant than the odious Pam Bondi.
Blanche desperately wants the “acting” to be removed from his title, and to get there he has all but publicly pledged to accelerate the prosecutions of any political enemy whose head Trump asks to be handed up to him on a platter. The first victim? Ex–FBI director James Comey, whose earlier indictment was quashed by the courts but who is now back in the Justice Department’s crosshairs. Comey was indicted on ludicrous charges of threatening to kill or injure Trump and of transmitting the threat via interstate commerce. The action that led to these charges? Briefly posting on social media an image he had photographed of shells on a beach arranged into a pattern reading “8647,” a phrase that has come to mean “Remove the 47th president.”
Given the protections of the First Amendment, not to mention the fact that one can buy “8647” merch, ranging from bumper stickers to T-shirts, on pretty much any major retail website these days, this is a charge that is going nowhere fast. But that’s not really the point here: The administration is using the powers of the Justice Department not to secure convictions of Trump’s enemies but to bankrupt them with huge legal bills and force them to spend their waking hours working out ways to counter these frivolous charges.
For Trump, securing a conviction of Comey would be the icing on the cake. But I suspect he is happy enough simply making Comey’s life miserable and holding up his experience as an example to other would-be detractors of what could happen to them should they critique him.
Of course, how much easier it will be to root out would-be Kimmels and Comeys when Congress reauthorizes and expands Section 702 of the FISA law that allows for secretive, warrantless snooping on noncitizens overseas and US citizens in contact with those individuals. Democrats have been trying to rein in this provision for years; this week, in a party-line vote, the GOP Congress instead moved closer to extending it. So much for the Republicans being the party of small government.
Now, any wrap-up of the week’s authoritarian bilge would be remiss in neglecting to mention the extraordinary State Department decision this week to issue a limited number of Trump-embossed US passports to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding. Let me emphasize how abnormal this is. Not a single other country on earth—not North Korea, not Iran, not Putin’s Russia, not Xi Jinping’s China—etches its current leader’s image onto its passports.
Popular
“swipe left below to view more authors”Swipe →
How would George Washington, who was adamant that he would not be a king and who deeply feared the dangers of letting one man accrue untrammeled power, feel about this? How would Tom Paine, who urged Americans to rise against the tyranny of monarchic rule, understand this moment?
Or, maybe more pertinently, what would Charles Manson, who forged a personality cult that bound his disciples to his psychopathic personhood, have thought of this leader who orders battleships to be named after him, his image to be draped from government buildings, his visage displayed on national park passes and minted onto commemorative coins, and now his scowling face imprinted into Americans’ vital travel documents? My guess is Manson would have recognized a kindred spirit.
And is America’s Dear Leader doing anything to actually benefit those over whom he looms? Of course not. Even as his political coalition fractures, he and his gargoyle acolytes are looking to milk every last ounce of their power to inflict harm on the most vulnerable.
You may not have read about it, but this week under Stephen Miller’s Darth Vader–like guidance, the DHS is again fast-tracking efforts to deport hundreds of unaccompanied young children, dragging toddlers, many of them lacking attorneys, into immigration courts to try to explain why they should not be deported.
They attempted this before—through family separations in Trump 1.0 and more recently in 2025. That year, agents arrested hundreds of Guatemalan kids, held them in detention sites around the country, and then one night rushed dozens of them onto airplanes—before, at the last minute, a judge put the kibosh on these foul plans.
Now they are trying it again: I can picture Miller, largely banished from the spotlight since the Minneapolis debacle, plotting in the shadows how to torment as many brown children as possible. He knows that Trump is sunsetting; he may even know that the MAGA movement itself is sunsetting. But as long as they have control over the levers of power, why not use them to the most destructive, inhuman effect possible?
